I mentioned Naomi Klein's book, "Everything must Change: Capitalism v The Climate" below and what a pleaure it was to read. Not entirely because Klein does not dodge the issues coming from the gobal warming crisis we find ourselves in but the writing and the development of her arguments make for enjoyable reading.
Klein is Canadian and she begins the book with a retelling of the attack on Canada at the WTO that effectively closed down it's solar panel manufacturing industry. With the death of that industry and the expansion of the Alberta tar fields and the massive increase in tracking Canada is, in the words of our own Prime Miniature, open for business. Klein has been attacked on the right and the left for her describing the crisis as one driven by capitalism. We all know that socialism/communism lost the ideology wars and how dare she fault capitalism? Read the book. A huge amount of research has been done for this book and she has anticipated the merchants of doubt and the paid nay sayers well. There is a trailer here http://www.naomiklein.org/main My friends in Coorabell (Kate and Phillip) alerted me to our mutual mate's book "Carbon Shock" by Mark Shapiro. Another work diligently researched for five years it is also a description of what is happening around the world to deal with, or not to deal with, global warming. Mark is an award winning author, journalist, teacher and all round good citizen. I read his book in one sitting (on my iPad) and will reread it because it was such a good read that I now feel I might have missed something in the way I got through it. Mark points to what some countries are doing and how global warming is already affecting our lives. In any case buy the book. download it to your device but read it. A book I read in it's paper form was "J" by Howard Jacobson who won the Man Booker prize with his previous novel "The Finkler Question" and the cover of J announced that it was long listed for the most recent Man prize. By the time I was reading it it had been short listed for the prize. Richard Flanagan eventually won and as I haven't yet read his book I can only comment that it must be a very good book indeed because Howard's book is even more impressive than Finkler which I also liked. Set in a unspecified near future in which an unspoken catastrophic recently past event has occurred which nobody can or will mention other than in a highly coded way. The book charts the love of two people who find lose and find each other again but in the course of finding and losing they also find out something about themselves and the shocking events that happened. Much of the story is grounded in what we know (or should) and much of it has the edgy humour that Howard is celebrated for. I must admit to a tear and feeling gutted at the book's end an d as I never read reviews before reading the book myself I won't spoil this one for you by rehearsing the story. Suffice to say that in one sitting the three books mentioned here will be worth the price of admission and your time in immersion. Happy reading.
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When I began this blog site I reviewed a book called Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Orestes and Erik M Conway. They have now published The Collapse of Western Civilization a sci-fi novel written from the point of view of 2093 and examining the failure of humans (us) to deal with climate change and the way we selfishly stuck to our unsustainable lives until 80% of the population were wiped out.
The book is thin, the ideas in it are enormous. Orestes is a historian and Conway a scientist. In their earlier Merchants BOOK they looked at the way that vested interests plotted against science to throw doubt over the discoveries of the links between smoking and cancer, the use of CFC's and the hole in the ozone layer and the human actives causing climate change. The book was given to me today by my friend Fred Mendelsohn. He is a scientist and a concerned citizen. He and I have been together to talks at Melbourne University where very informed and brilliant scientists have spoken with a great deal of research and understanding about the mess we are in. After each of these I commented to Fred that these excellent events were the convincing talking to the convinced and that scientists needed to find out how to get to everybody bypassing the politicians and media owners who either don't or won't get it. Oreskes and Conway write about this syndrome persuasively. They coin "human adaptive optimism" which presupposes that whatever lurks just beyond the horizon to threaten us our human inventiveness will fix it and we will continue to live in a paradise on earth. Like the Klein book (see below) they not only sound a warning trumpet but do so from the point of view of writing after the disasters have happened. Our species has the ability to understand what is happening at the same time as ignore what is happening. These two skills will collide and for many of us in a future that is not distant but imminent. "Mass migration of undernourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never before seen." Just glancing down at the open letter below this parrot crows about getting rid of the price on carbon as if that is a rational triumph over voodoo instead of a disastrous backwards step into self-destruction. The climate refugees that the writers foresee are on the move already. The book draws maps of Manhattan, Bangladesh and Europe from 2093 and after the big ice sheets are no more. This would be sobering reading if enough people could be bothered and if it wasn't countered by the deep pockets of the Merchants of Doubt who have short term profits in mind and will do anything to protect them even at their expense of their own inevitable demise. |